Revisiting the prequel

I've had a lot of projects, a daughter with ear issues, my own dental care, work hours and economics to contend with... It burnt me out on writing, with productivity in mind, so I let my mind wander and returned to my circa 1978 "prequel" of Étienne's youth and love story.

I've drafted the new first chapter and I like it. I don't feel it's perfect but it's a start. I'll share page one:

Chapter One


Heat consumed Étienne from multiple angles; the sun from Ghislaine’s window soothed his nude flesh and his aching thrust erupted inside her with a rippling whirlpool that chased away the Paris dampness. He offered a tired grunt and savored that moment when his muscles dissolved. She gasped and collapsed against his chest, her body still quivering against his.

He cried. Her cheek pressed against the metal of his identification plaque. The slight tickle of Ghislaine’s long bleached blond hair blanketing him and the soft yet firm push of her breasts pressed against him had punctured the cigar smoke. The telltale earthy scent of Montecristo #4 had fallen when his commanding officer reported that Étienne’s father had died. That was more than a week ago. With the aftershocks of the sex the only barrier between him and his new found grief, Étienne wrapped his arms around Ghislaine and braced for the tears.

His father smoked Montecristo #4 cigars. The cigar smoke had filled the barracks like a protective cloud. It stayed with him as he packed, during the eight-hour, red-eye flight to Paris, and through his brisk walk to Ghislaine’s apartment.

Character cultural relativity

I'm not sure if that's an appropriate title, but this addresses how characters react to each other within the confines of their experiences and their culture. From an email to a friend: "In a way I wanted to tell you this in person,but life's unpredictable nature might make it impossible for us to sit down and have a conversation. I put all my writing away a couple weeks ago. It was frustrating me and not enjoyable so I decided to read, clean my house, and potentially revisit my other hobbies. Just to recharge the batteries. This is always an awesome exercise because it allows the crazy new thoughts to enter your mind. Like my werewolf stories. Then I had a strange thought about Étienne's back story. I have waffled a bit on his history-- at one point he failed his bac (the end of high school exams used for university entrance) and went to work for his father. He and Basilie then represented two avenues to success: him, hard work and her, education/ family background. This is starting to sound like a blog entry. May have to copy it and post. Then I made Ét narrowly pass his exam and make it into a prestigious private art school. And drop out when his father died. So he drove Basilie crazy because she wanted to attend a similar school and couldn't get in and he dropped out! Similar to the kind of jealousy she feels when he gets an O visa to the US and she gets an HB. But that bothered me because Ét probably wouldn't have the academic credentials or the money for such a school. BUT if he doesn't go to school, he'll end up conscripted into the army. Which I always believed his brother was serving his conscription when their father died. But really, Edmond is the one who went to university and has small children so realistically he would have a deferment.  It looks like if Étienne served his conscription, it would have been in 1977, and probably shortly after the independence of Djibouti. Étienne. Army. Djibouti. With me? I do not doubt he would be a lousy soldier, but I think he would be very clever in making social arrangements for the guys, and helping repair uniforms of his peers to avoid the hazing aspects of the military.  And what makes this interesting is according to the sources I could find, 98% of Djibouti women TODAY still undergo severe circumcision/ genital mutilation. And I think being an observer to a culture that does this could make him very pro-feminist. I also think that it would make some interesting conflict with Basilie about the status of women in the world, since she's an educated, upper class European and argue that the world has improved for women and Étienne would believe her a sheltered, ethnocentric brat. Angel"

Writing versus editing

The other day I remarked on Facebook on the progress I'd made with edits on my first manuscript. I wrote this manuscript in high school and rewrote it seven or eight times in my twenties. I had to, I had no life experience and every time I learned something I saw a new nuance of how life worked that I had to share with my characters. Some people often lament not having caught their writing bug early in life, that they wasted too much time on other things. I remind them that it's hard to be a writer when your so naive regarding the human condition.

Plenty of friends have remarked that I have spent too much time on this project, but I enjoy it, and thus far it has yielded a series of three manuscripts. Now if it makes me happy to work on that series, even when I could do something else... Well, it's my compulsion, my hobby and I do have other ideas and projects kicking around.

They just never have the same pull. These folks are my first born, and as with real-life parenting, I have a learning curve. I have made mistakes, and I can either ignore them and move forward or try to rectify them. Plenty of people move on. Me, I want to fix them. It would hurt too much to know I had it in my power to change something and I didn't.

That said... Another author friend mentioned to me that she loves editing. That got me thinking. I love editing too or I wouldn't do it year in and year out. Do I love it more than writing?

Ooooooo....

Writing is emotional, messy, surprising and frustrating. Even if you plot, you learn things as you go. You cry. You laugh. You shake. You hit walls and climb them. You know what's going to happen and you don't. You know these people and then you find out that you don't.

Editing allows you to take all that mixed up stuff from the writing process and sort it, refine it and polish it. You get this high that says, "Yeah! This will work." And it's different from that writing high, because the writing high is very similar to a mother with a newborn baby-- all mothers think their babies are beautiful, whether they have conehead, cradle cap or look like a froggy old man. You need to step back and let that baby grow into its skin.

I love them both. I feel more control in the editing process, but I love the emotional roller coaster of dumping words on the page for the first time.

Editing, editing, editing

Perhaps this is a message of hope. Perhaps it's a warning that if you're considering the writing life, then have your heart and mind prepared for the frustrations and thrills of trying to tame the written word.

I revealed my first two chapters to a friend, fellow writer and former critique group member (she's moved out of the area, we did not throw her out). I needed someone to read them, not for a line by line critique but just a general "does it work" idea and to reassure myself that I hadn't edited the manuscript into a mess that no longer made sense.

These are legitimate questions/fears.

She liked them. She had read a recent version of the manuscript a couple years ago and thought the antagonist's motives more clear and his character more believable.

These are the same changes-- to the mythical structure of my supernatural universe-- that I labored over a month ago trying to decide whether these changes would be for THIS series or a book in the future.

A writer has to listen to his/her heart, because those lingering doubts of "what if" would haunt him/her every time a rejection comes in. Maybe I waste too much time writing and editing, but if I as a person am always changing, my manuscripts must change too.

One of the first things you learn in journalism is to save everything you write and to go through it once a year and throw it all in the trash except for maybe your five favorite pieces. You grow so quickly under the routine of professional writing that those early pieces look like garbage. In hindsight, they are embarrassing.

Fiction has similar growth. Whether it be the bad poems an author wrote in high school or a first manuscript, eventually we look back and see the faults. But since I'm not published yet, I can improve these early words and make them something I'm still proud of. I'm okay with that.

September around the corner

Note the generic headline. That means I have nothing on my mind and no idea what the heck I'm doing or writing about. Scary, eh? Blogging for blogging's sake.

School started for me and my daughter yesterday, which means I can expect my free time to either disappear thanks to economics homework or reappear since child heads to school each day. It's too soon to tell.

I have been tweeting more than usual these days, as some old friends have made some new use of the tool and somehow sucked me into it also. That's okay. I guess.

Between my iron deficiency, my child, my work schedule and my volunteer schedule, my writing time has been slim. But I've steadily been reworking the mythology of the novel I've been shopping to agents, Manipulations, book one of my Fashion and Fiends series. The more I work on it, the more I wonder if the friend who suggested to me marketing them out of order might be right.

Books two (Courting Apparitions) and three (Absolution) are definitely more exciting than book one, and since book three transitions one of the protagonists into the antagonist, I can't help but wonder if I should market book three first and leave books one and two for the story of how this all came to be...

Kind of like Star Wars.

That's lots of run-ons and fragments but... got my thoughts down.

Still editing

I have finished the editing for the first six chapters of the new mythic concept for Manipulations. The chapters are still going at a pace of about an hour a piece and I enjoy them. I've removed a lot of text, having deleted about 20 pages so far. That wasn't my intent, but it will be interesting to see what happens at the end. I will have room to add scenes if I need to. That could work well.

It's got me thinking about the difference between easy edits and laborious ones. I really believe that the easier the edits, the closer to "right" the story is.

Simplicity

I have a few free minutes and an internet signal so I thought I'd make a quick post.

I have edited the first two chapters of my first book, the one I usually shop around. A few weeks ago I thought I had a brilliant concept (and I still think it's clever and sharp) that would improve my villain. Galen has always had weak motivations. What I had in mind altered the entire universe, gave the universe a new mythology and the supernatural rules for my villain would change.

This meant massive rewrites of ever chapter in his POV.

I was willing to do that, but every time I tried I couldn't get the right zing. It required a new first chapter and nothing worked. Nothing had enough suspense and tension. And then I reversed the idea. I had the same idea, making one character a totally different creature, but not Galen.

Galen remains a witch.

His mate becomes something different. Something he is very jealous of.

And that jealous is a pivotal part of his motivation.

Minor edits to the first couple chapters have taken an hour each. This thrills me. It feels like I'm on the right track. I like this because every time I read the original text, I couldn't help but think, "I like this. I don't want to delete this."

My new revisions preserve the original story and its settings.